Oni of Wild Places

The upkeep tax here is the entire pitch: a 6/5 with haste that arrives swinging for six, but every turn afterward demands you bounce a red creature back to hand. The natural read is "bounce yourself," recasting the Oni each turn as pure tempo, which is a terrible deal at six mana. The design intent runs the other direction. This is engine fuel for decks built around enters-the-battlefield triggers, where returning a red creature each upkeep is not a cost but a guaranteed replay: a Spitebellows for repeat removal, a value creature whose ETB you want to fire again, even another copy of something cheap. The Oni asks you to reframe a bounce drawback as a recurring trigger, the same conceptual move that powers blink decks except the blink is forced, free, and aimed only at red. The Demon Spirit class on Kamigawa came loaded with self-punishing upkeep clauses (the plane's demons rarely came clean), and this one is among the more constructive of them once you stop reading the trigger as a tax. The haste matters more than it looks: it lets the body do work the turn it lands, before the upkeep clause ever resolves, so the first hit is always free of the downside. Whether the Oni is a beater that sometimes recurs your creatures or a recursion engine wearing a 6/5 body depends entirely on what red creatures you surround it with.